The fabrication of a hand for use as a display member in a timepiece is particularly complex, in particular when the hand is to be fitted to a top of the range timepiece, for which the hand has to have a particularly polished surface appearance, possibly with facets.
Currently, hands are fabricated in brass, steel, gold, aluminium, or in a special alloy. They can be galvanically treated, covered with paint, oxidized or untreated if the material used is gold. They are generally made by machining or die stamping.
However, satisfactory dimensional precision can still not be obtained with the machining and die stamping techniques for these materials, and additional operations of deburring, polishing, etc are required to obtain the final shape of the hand.
Moreover, it is generally necessary to apply multiple treatments to the hands to guarantee high quality surface finish.
Further, current hand fabricating techniques do not allow all desired forms to be achieved, thereby curbing the creativity of timepiece designers.
It is an object of the present invention to propose a hand that is easier to fabricate while offering great design freedom as to its form, and that can be fabricated in series so as to minimize production costs.